Scout Report Selection, November 29, 1996
The Scout Report is the flagship publication of the Internet Scout Project. Published every Friday both on the web
and by email, it provides a fast, convenient way to stay informed of valuable resources on the Internet. The Internet Scout Project is located in the
Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is funded by a grant from the
National Science Foundation. The Scout Report description of the Interactive Fly states "...this site offers users the benefit of a great deal of original research into the genes involved in the development of the fruit fly."
News announcement June, 1997
Human Genome News (HGN) is a newsletter of the U.S. Human Genome Project sponsored by the genome
program of the Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research. HGN is intended to
facilitate communication among genome researchers and to inform persons interested in genome research. The announcement "FlyBase Updated" includes the fact that FlyBase servers "now provide access to the Interactive Fly...FlyBase has
developed a hierarchy of the Interactive Fly that links to specific pages, and gene lists link to individual gene records
in both FlyBase and the Interactive Fly." HGN, January-June 1997; 8:(3 & 4)
2 star rating from BioMedLink December 8, 1997
BioMedNet "The Worldwide Club for the
Biological and Medical Community," maintains BioMedLink, an evaluated and annotated data base of internet resources. Use of BioMedLink is free to viewers, but does require registration (user name and password). The BioMedLink evaluation of the Interactive Fly says "this is an excellent site for anyone interested in Drosophila and neurobiology."
Netwatch Site Visit
Science Magazine Vol. 280, May 15, 1998
Netwatch section: Delving Into Drosophila, edited by Jocelyn Kaiser. Available on-line by subscription.
Kaiser writes: "Loaded with information on protein function, mutation effects, homologous genes and other organisms, and links to Medline abstracts, the site is 'the only place where you can go up and down the hierarchy' of development, says Brody, adding, 'it explains what the [Human] Genome Project is about.'"
News article
Flies Invade Human Genetics, by Ricki Lewis in The Scientist, Volume 12, No. 13, June 22, 1998.
The Scientist, "the newspaper for the life sciences professional," is issued bi-weekly, and is available free on-line and/or by mail subscription for a fee. The Lewis article presents parallels between gene function in Drosophila and humans, and explains why Drosophila is an ideal organism for studying the roles genes play in development. Beautiful photographic illustrations.
An HMS Beagle Webpick
Web Resources of Model Organisms, by Pamela M. Gannon, July 24, 1998 in issue 35 of HMS Beagle, the journal of BioMedNet. Gannon says: "The Interactive Fly...is an excellent, general informational resource for Drosophila designed to showcase Drosophila genes and their roles in development."
News article
The
Mighty Fruit Fly, Atlas of DNA Research, by Judy Silber, in
The Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1998. The article chronicles the history of Drosophila research and explains how Drosophila became the organism of choice for the study of biological processes. The article provides a link to The Interactive fly.
Site of the Day October 20, 1998
Selected by New Scientist Planet Science, the award winning online voice of New Scientist, a weekly magazine of science and technology. Site of the Day is a feature
in the Keysites section, which covers internet related
topics. Archived in Hotspots, the citation states: "...the Interactive Fly is a convenient and well-organised compendium of information...The extensive list of fly genes gives more information about the structure and function of each gene than do many printed references."
Internet Resource August 1999
An article about The Interactive Fly in Trends in Genetics describes the history and future of web based gene network resources:
Brody, T. (1999). The Interactive Fly: gene networks, development and the Internet. Trends in Genetics 15 (8): 333-4. 10431196
Citation
Academic Research on the Internet: Options for Scholars and Libraries Edited by Helen Laurence, William Miller, Haworth Press, 2000. This book allows you to "find what youíre looking for with the best Internet resources for academic research in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences." John Sisson, in a chapter entitled "Biology Sites on the World Wide Web: a brief survey", writes about The Interactive Fly: "This is an excellent example of the kind of information that an individual can gather together as a resource and develop into a definitive source."
Sci/Tech Web Award June 2002
Scientific American has cited The Interactive Fly among its second annual Scientific American.com Sci/Tech Web Awards. In a section on Biology web resources the citation reads: "Find out about bazooka, eyeless, lame duck, shaggy and all the rest: this cyberspace guide to the myriad fruit fly (Drosophila) genes and their control functions is a monumental magnum opus that has become a standard in the field of developmental biology."
News Article September 2002
The NIH Catalyst is a bimonthly publication written for and by intramural scientists of the National Institutes of Health to foster communication and collaboration across NIH institutes. An article titled Brody's Site: No Fly-by-night, written by Rashmi Nemade, summarizes the history and content of the The Interactive Fly. The article describes the Interactive Fly website as a resource in which the "novice or expert can maneuver through and grasp the Drosophila genome with just a few clicks."
Citation
Sequence - Evolution - Function : Computational Approaches in Comparative Genomics by Eugene V. Koonin, Michael Y. Galperin, Kluwer Academic Publishing, 2002.
This book is "an introduction to the computational approaches that play a critical role in the emerging new branch of biology known as functional genomics." Koonin and Gilperin write, "The Interactive Fly is a superb collection of information on tissue and organ development in Drosophila." They continue, 'arguably, the most interesting part of the database is the listing of 36 evolutionarily conserved developmental pathways, common for Drosophila and other organisms, such as vertebrates.+
Netwatch Site Visit December 2004
Science, Vol. 306, Issue 5702, 1661. DATABASE: To Build a Fly.
"An inert egg can't morph into a flitting fruit fly without tinman and Mothers against dpp, klumpfuss and knirps, legless, heartless, tailless, and hairless. Find out how these and more than 600 other genes mold Drosophila development at the Interactive Fly, created 9 years ago by neurogeneticist Thomas Brody of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and hosted by the Society for Developmental Biology. The site also brims with background information on fly formation, including a developmental atlas."
STRING uses The Interactive Fly for text parcing January 2005
Nucleic Acid Research 33: D433-D437.
Christian von Mering and Lars J. Jensen, et al. (2005) of the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, developed STRING ('Search Tool for the Retrieval of Interacting Genes/Proteins') to simplify access to information by providing a comprehensive collection of protein-protein associations for a large number of organisms. The associations are derived from high-throughput experimental data, from the mining of databases and literature, and from predictions based on genomic context analysis. The associations are extended beyond the organism in which they were originally described, by automatic transfer to orthologous protein pairs in other organisms. STRING parses Medline, OMIM, and The Interactive Fly, and currently holds 730,000 proteins in 180 fully sequenced organisms.
FlyExpress, an express pattern search engine, provides links to The Interactive Fly. April 2006
Sudhir Kumar and Bernard Van Emden of Arizona State University, Tempe, along with a host of students and collaborators. have developed
FlyExpress, an image-matching search engine, for finding biologically similar gene expression patterns. Genes with overlapping expression patterns can be discovered using the Basic Expression Search Tool for images (BESTi). Expression patterns can be retrieved by entering gene names, synonyms, ontology terms and keywords. FlyExpress and The Interactive Fly maintain cross-links to one another to provide cross reference of images and text concerning Drosophila gene expression. See the resource 'Expression pattern tiles' ( 1, 2, 3 and 4) that serves as The Interactive Fly's entree into FlyExpress.
Citation
Identification of tightly regulated groups of genes during Drosophila melanogaster embryogenesis by Sean D Hooper, Stephanie Boué, Roland Krause, Lars J. Jensen, Christopher E. Mason, Murad Ghanim, Kevin P. White, Eileen E. M. Furlong, and Peer Bork.
In this study, a time-series analysis of whole-genome expression data during Drosophila development indicated that up to 86% of its genes change their relative transcript level during embryogenesis. By applying conservative filtering criteria and requiring ësharp' transcript changes, 1534 maternal genes, 792 transient zygotic genes, and 1053 genes whose transcript levels increase during embryogenesis, were identifed. Common and distinctive functional features of these expression groups were highlighted and a coupling between downregulation of transcript levels and targeted protein degradation was identified. As part of this project, a total of 1309 genes grouped in 31 pathways were retrieved from the Interactive Fly database. Out of these, 86% were spotted on the microarray that was performed for this analysis.
Citation
Effects of carbon dioxide narcosis on ovary activation and gene expression in worker honeybees, Apis mellifera by Preeyada Koywiwattrakul, Graham J Thompson, Sririporn Sitthipraneed, Benjamin P Oldroyd, and Ryszard Maleszka.
In an effort to uncover genes associated with ovary activation in honey bee workers, the extent to which eight candidate genes co-varied in their expression with experimentally-induced changes in worker reproductive state was examined. The results show that the expression of vitellogenin and transferrin is correlated with ovary activation in workers, and may therefore be part of the gene network involved in the regulatory control of functional sterility in honeybees. Selection of candidate genes for this study was based their functional gene descriptions at Interactive Fly.
Listing of COPUS Network Participants
The Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS)
highlights The Society for Developmental Biology and their resource, The Interactive Fly. COPUS is a grassroots effort linking universities, scientific societies, science centers and museums, advocacy groups, media, educators, businesses, and industry in a peer network having as its goal a greater public understanding of the nature of science and its value to society.
In their citation, COPUS states that The Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) was founded in 1939 to promote the field of developmental biology and to advance our understanding of developmental biology at all levels. To this end, within developmental biology, the SDB fosters excellence in research and education, provide advice and resources on careers, and provides information for the public. Perhaps most importantly, the SDB provides a communication hub for all developmental biologists. About The Interactive Fly, the citation states that this resource "provides an immense body of information on the development of Drosophila melanogaster."
